Book Image

Seam 2.x Web Development

Book Image

Seam 2.x Web Development

Overview of this book

The Seam framework from JBoss allows developers to use JSF, Facelets, EJB, and JPA to write conversational web applications. But you will first have to learn how these standard technologies are integrated using Seam and how they can be built upon using additional Seam components. If you need to build a Java web application fast, but don't have time to learn all these complex features, then this book is for you. The book provides a practical approach to developing Seam applications highlighting good development practices. It provides a complete walk through to develop Web applications using Seam, Facelets, and RichFaces and explains how to deploy them to the JBoss Application Server. You can start using key aspects of the Seam framework immediately because this book builds on them chapter by chapter, finally ending with details of enterprise functionality such as PDF report generation and event frameworks. First, the book introduces you to the fundamentals of Seam applications, describing topics such as Injection, Outjection and Bijection. You will understand the Facelets framework, AJAX, database persistence, and advanced Seam concepts through the many examples in the book. The book takes a practical approach throughout to describing the technologies and tools involved. You will add functionality to Seam applications after you learn how to use the Seam Generator RAD tools and how to customize and fully test application functionality. Hints and tips are provided along the way of how to use Seam and the JBoss Application Server.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Seam 2.x Web Development
Credits
About the author
About the reviewers
Preface

Chapter 4. Facelets

So far, we've looked at the basics of Seam and learned how to build web applications using the Seam Framework. In all of the examples that we've seen so far, we've used JSP as our view technology, and custom build ant scripts for building and deploying the applications. However, the JBoss recommended view technology is Facelets rather than JSP. In this chapter, we will look at why Facelets is recommended, and what it offers over JSP. We'll also look at the SeamGen tool and see why this is a much better way of creating Seam applications and build scripts. SeamGen generated build scripts provide many advantages over the custom build scripts that we have seen so far, including support for advanced testing of web applications. Finally, we'll bring both SeamGen and Facelets together and re-create the Vacation Planner project that we wrote in Chapter 3 (realizing, in the course of doing so, how much easier and more advanced it is), using these technologies. In the subsequent...